Our ‘job’ (in everyday, routine life) is to both observe the description of things that we have been provided with and defend / enforce them. This – it is implicitly understood – is our sacred task. It has to be implicit because otherwise it gives away the fact that ‘the description only is a description’, that what we call ‘something’ is only what we call it, is only what we say it is. We are kept far too busy with the task of ‘maintaining the status quo’ to ever question why we should be doing this, why that should be so ‘super-important’ – if you were ever to ask this question people would look at you as if there were something deeply wrong with you. It’s ‘the question we are never supposed to ask’, and if we do ask it then we straightaway show ourselves to be ‘traitors to the Great Cause’…
When we don’t consciously register our description of the world as ‘only a description’ then it becomes ‘the default setting that everything always has to revert to’. It becomes the ‘Equilibrium Value’ that the system keeps mechanically bringing everything back to. The unacknowledged description thus becomes an unreal world that – despite its irredeemable and undeniable unreality – we can never escape from. How can we possibly ever escape from an unreal reality which we can’t see to be unreal, an arbitrary description of the world that we don’t understand to be ‘merely arbitrary’. It’s not that we ‘can’t conceive of an alternative’, but rather that we can’t get our heads around the possibility of there being such a thing as ‘an alternative’ in the first place. The Equilibrium World is the only world we are capable of knowing about. We can’t ‘think outside the box’ – the box is our thinking and so of course we can’t think outside of it…
The error of ‘casually assuming that the way the rational/conceptual mind describes things must be the way that these things actually are’ costs us dear, therefore – we are constrained within a Formal World, a Formal System (a system we made up ourselves), and to be constrained within a FS so that our only existence is in terms of this FS is to be separated from reality itself. A finite game cannot be contained with the Infinite one, says James Carse. Regularity can be contained within irregularity (as a ‘special case’ of irregularity), but this doesn’t work the other way around. Randomness cannot come out of a rule – only ‘the rule’ can come out of the rule (there simply isn’t the flexibility there for anything else to emerge). This ‘separation from the Real’ constitutes a deprivation the impact or significance of which we have absolutely no comprehension of. Nothing could have a bigger impact on us than this. ‘The Real is everything’, which means that the only type of existence we’re left with is an imaginary sort, and – as Robert Burton tells us – ‘A man who lives in imagination loses his life’. To life purely in imagination is the state of ‘privation’ that Thomas Aquinas talks about. ‘Evil is the privation of good’ (and therefore not a thing in itself), he says. To live in box without knowing that we are is to be ‘separated from the good’ because there’s no ‘good’ in the box. The box is unreal – there’s nothing in it…
What we’re looking at here is ‘the sneaky substitution of the symbol for the thing’ (Baudrillard-style), therefore – we’re looking at the mechanism by which the voraciously invasive realm of the Hyperreal comes into being. Like some kind of incredible super-weed, Hyperreality digs in with a vengeance and – once established – it can’t be dug up again. The process is irreversible. Once it takes root at all it’s practically impossible to ever fully uproot, practically impossible to ever get back to the situation that prevailed beforehand, before ‘the contaminating event’, before ‘the invasion’. More than just being like some ‘super-virulent invasive species’, the Hyperreal is like a toxic algal bloom which immediately annihilates all the other, native life forms that were living there (in perfect harmony) before it came onto the scene. ‘The Hyperreal outcompetes the Real’ (or – as we could also say – ‘Evil drives out good’). How often have we heard this? Evil is easy, after all, and it results in an immediate ‘pay off’, which good does not. The system does not celebrate virtue, but only the theatrical (or 2-dimensional) performance of it. There is, in short, no profit in being a decent human being; there are no benefits that are going to be coming our way as a result of playing fair. The Hyperreal outcompetes the real because the real doesn’t cheat, because the real doesn’t take shortcuts, whereas the Hyperreal World is nothing else but one giant shortcut. Hyperreality is no more than one big, fat ‘cheat’….
The HRW is one giant shortcut but it’s a shortcut to nowhere. It only ever goes back to itself, and ‘itself’ is a self-referential illusion. ‘Itself’ is a fiction that we inadvertently (and unknowingly) keep on feeding. Hyperreality has the apparently miraculous property of being able to expand outwards forever – it can replicate virally at zero cost to itself. It can reboot itself instantly from even the tiniest trace, from even the slightest most insignificant remnant. It can do this because it doesn’t need anything outside of itself in order to launch itself into unlimited expansion. Being self-referential, ‘itself’ is all it needs. Hyperreality ‘feeds on itself’ – that’s the type of beast we’re talking about here. The thinker doesn’t need anything outside of its own eternally recycled thoughts to keep it going. What we’re looking at here is the well-known alchemical motif of ‘self-devouring’, therefore. Alan Watts explains this key principle in terms of documentary-making (harking back – we might say – to the golden age of documentaries on TV, back in the 70s and 80’s). When there were only a few documentary makers (dotted here and there amidst everything else, amidst the actual real world) then that is still fine, there is still no problem here – the documentary makers can document the world around them to their hearts’ content and there will still be that basic connection with reality. Past a certain point however something happens – self-referentiality cuts in and the TV crews start making documentaries about themselves making documentaries and then – all of a sudden – everything has changed forever. Incest becomes normalized; the real world is no longer needed since the system can now feed quite happily on itself – it has become 100% self-sufficient. Self-devouring (‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul’) is now the ‘order of the day’. This point of transition is however perfectly imperceptible to all concerned. The point of transition between R and not-R is entirely invisible and none of us ever spot it (the murder of R has no witnesses, as Jean Baudrillard says).
This isn’t to say that we can’t spot it – the signs are always there but we don’t ever see them. We’re kept looking in another direction – an ‘unreal’ direction! We’re far too preoccupied to ‘see the signs’ – we’ve been given a job to do – as we have said – and this is a job that will keep us busy on a full-time basis. We are busy ‘fighting over fictional boundaries’; we are fully engaged ‘taking imaginary boundaries seriously’ (which doesn’t give us time for anything else). The task that we’ve been given is ‘far too important’ for there to be anything else. The other way of putting this is to say that we’re kept 100% occupied with the task of obsessively observing, promoting and defending the description of things that the thinking mind automatically generates for us (in just the same way that a toaster automatically toasts toast, or an electric hand-drier automatically dries hands). The routinely produced ‘description of things’ that the mind furnishes us with translates simply into what we call ‘things’, needless to say. There are no things really (as Bodhidharma tells us), there is only the idea of things (with nothing whatsoever behind the idea).
To understand ourselves as existing within a world that is made up of things is to understand ourselves as being ‘things’ too. We’re things in a world of things. A thing is ‘a thing’ precisely because it can never be any more than what it is described as being, than what it is defined as being – it can never go beyond its own imaginary boundaries, in other words. It is ‘its own boundaries’. What we’re essentially talking about here is ‘the relentless enforcement of a conceptual box’. Un-enforced conceptual boxes – on the other hand – aren’t anything; a CB isn’t anything unless it is promoted, unless we ‘fight on its behalf’ (for all the world as if it does exist). A conceptual box has less reality to it than a soap bubble – it’s a pure phantom and so in order to make these phantom ‘things’ real we have to maintain and promote the boundaries that have been so arbitrary drawn. We ‘box ourselves in with our own efforts’. ‘Boxing ourselves in’ is of course the whole point of the exercise, although we don’t see it like this. We see it ‘upside-down’ and because of our inverted perception we see this business of ‘being contained within unreal boundaries’ (and all boundaries are unreal) as ‘a positive’, as ‘an actual achievement’. We are kept busy containing ourselves, blocking ourselves, on the basis of our (inverted) understanding that this is somehow a good thing. ‘Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.’ says Richard Bach in his novel Illusions.
It’s not as if there is anyone standing over us cracking a whip and forcing us to be faithful to thought’s library of descriptions – we do all the work ourselves. This is true of ideology generally (as any self-respecting sociologist would be happy to tell you) and all thoughts are based on a central ideology. Thoughts are ‘the bureaucracy that proceeds from ideology’. What controls us is not some sinister overlord-type entity, but our own way of seeing the world (only it isn’t our own way but thought’s way since it is the mechanism of thought that creates the descriptions, that creates the boundaries). This is the job we can never take a break from (and for which we will apparently be rewarded in heaven). And it is not the case that thought is the dark master it’s a literal bad guy either. We could if we wanted say that the system of thought literally ‘equals’ Mara, Lord of illusions (or that it literally ‘equals’ Lord Grayface, who is the ultimate bureaucrat in Robert Anton Wilson’s cosmology) but this type of assertion is itself the production of thought. There are no ‘literally true descriptions’ because there’s no such thing as ‘literal truth’. Truth is not literal, but rather it is a boundary condition imposed by rules (which means therefore that is an inversion of the truth). Truth can’t ever be the output of the thinking machine – it can’t be arrived at via the action of exclusive either/or logic (which is what creates the descriptions that we are so happy to identify with, so happy to swear fealty to). It is – on the contrary – what remains when we subtract or withdraw all of our projections, all of the make-believe ‘divisions’ that we are so fond of. Truth is Everything, it’s ‘the whole shebang’ (which is not ‘a thing’, which is not ‘a handy conceptual box we can put stuff in for the sake of ‘order’, for the sake of ‘tidiness’).
‘One is not a number’, Aristotle tells us. One is not ‘a box’. Numbers (or ‘gradations’) have absolutely nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with logic, with polarity, with the routine functioning of the everyday ‘black & white thinking mind’. We are kept busy enacting routines (or following rules) as if this were actually achieving something, as if this were something important or valuable. We’re kept busy containing ourselves within ‘the box’, as if the box were not ‘an unreal thing’, as if the box were not an exercise of the imagination, and by doing this we make ourselves unreal (or ‘imaginary’) too…
Image credit – docfilmacademy.com
